Seventy-two years after Walker Evans
published his groundbreaking photos from Havana, photographer Jeff Cowen
delivers his own personal street-level view of Cuba in 2005.

In this sampling from Cowen’s recent work, the same Havana light
that once captivated the young Evans now reveals faces and artifacts of
a far-less vibrant society. Except perhaps for one photo — the back
of an elegant young woman in a simple white dress — any sense of
glamour, style, or hope that Evans captured in 1933 has mostly vanished.

A sense of resigned poverty (or humble expectations) pervades Cowen’s
images. A dog snarls from the roof of a barricaded building. A dead cat
decomposes in the street. The defiant glare of a smoking man makes his
missing fore-arm seem like a secondary detail.

Cowen finds beauty, poetry and timeless dignity here. Laundry looks like
a musical composition, hanging out to dry in the bright light. Tough young
lovers reveal instants of vulnerability. The bright geometric patterns
of a pregnant woman’s dress play against the veiled, worried look
of her male companion who sits closely next to her in shadow. A young
girl and her bouncing ball seem suspended above the barren textures of
a broad open space.

In an email exchange, Jeff Cowen talked with me about this work, and his
photography in general. Here's an excerpt:

Were you intending to make a certain type of photograph or
series before you got to Cuba, or did you just respond to what you discovered?

I try to work from my subconscious. I simply try to just be an open channel
and let the work come through me. Sort of like a jazz musician. I am less
interested in where I am photographing and more interested in the essence
of the humanity of my subject and of my own humanity. For me all humans
belong to the same country.

Do you consider these photos to be reportage or street photography
or something else?

They are simply photographs for me. This is a complicated and interesting
question. I know that when you change the way you look at something the
thing you look at changes. That is what makes photography so interesting.
I can tell you, that in the end I am more interested in what they are
not than in what they are... labels do not interest me. Try to define
silence, I think you can only do it by saying what it is not... And silence
is what I am after. The silence in between a breath.

Your photos have a quiet moodiness to them — is that
the general feeling you got from the people in Cuba?

I think if you look at my early New York work you will find a similar
emotional tone, this is more about me perhaps and is not meant to be a
report about Cuba. I am interested that each photograph should work as
a single entity on its own, this is crucial in my work. I am looking to
transcend the moment in search of the eternalness of that moment, that
is the paradox of photography that fascinates me.

How does this work fit into your overall body of work? It
seems like such a departure from your sculptural collages and nudes.

As you know, Jim, I took off several years from photography to study academic
drawing and then painting and plastic space.... I look at paintings as
much or more than photography. I bring this up as you might have noticed
a stronger sense of formalism in this work. For me this is not a departure,
but an exercise in honing my skills. For example, especially in my collages
there must be a very strong formal and initial structural quality, or
the piece does not work. I have been working for the past month now on
a very difficult mural photo collage using multiple images. But at the
base of this collage was an initial image that worked as a photograph.
There is no escaping this. A photographic composition must work as an
abstraction first for me. Then I can fill in the details. That is what
I did in Cuba, and what I do in the studio is not different.

However, in my studio I work against a very simple background. This forces
me to deal directly with the spirit and emotional world of the model which
is my interest. So as much as possible I want to eliminate all of the
inessentials to bring me into a more direct relationship with the subject,
with truth. This is why photographing on the street is extremely challenging
and difficult. Because there is so much going on out of your control than
you have in the studio... However that being said, the work I do in the
studio informs and strengthens my street work and the reverse. My studio
images have changed this year as a result of my Cuban work. So for me
there is no departure whatsoever.... In fact this is precisely why I became
a photographer. It affords me the possibility to explore the exterior
and interior worlds and the relationship of one to the other. I have always
loved the street equally as much as I love working in the studio. And
I shall continue to work in both manners. It’s all the same really,
just different subject matter. I am still working from my guts, heart
and soul.

Printing is like jazz for
me. I won’t know until they are printed and each print in the edition
will have its own quality. Do you think Thelonius Monk ever played one
song the same way every time he recorded it? No way.

Baobab trees are some of the largest living things on the planet and have a potential lifespan of more than a thousand years. Elaine Ling travelled far distances to find and photograph some incredible specimens with her large format camera. Can you spot the human posing next to the tree?